Plastic pollution has serious consequences for the environment, people, and other animals. But this terrible pollution is not inevitable.
As you can see in the chart, in high-income countries, plastic pollution per person is 100 times lower than in lower income countries. This is despite people in high-income countries using much more plastic and generating much more plastic waste per person.
It’s also not due to rich countries simply shipping their plastic waste to poorer ones.
The huge difference in pollution rates is a consequence of how waste is managed.
In high-income countries, most waste is collected and sent to controlled landfills or to facilities that incinerate or recycle it. In many low- and middle-income countries, there is much more uncollected waste and poorly managed disposal sites.
In a new article, Hannah Ritchie and Veronika Samborska explain how each dollar spent upgrading systems in a low- or lower-middle-income country prevents roughly 25,000 times more plastic pollution than the same dollar spent on advanced infrastructure in a rich country.
We already have the knowledge and tools to reduce global plastic pollution to just 2% of its current levels. With the right focus and investment, most of it is preventable.
by ourworldindata
4 Comments
**Data source:** Cottom, J.W., Cook, E. & Velis, C.A. A local-to-global emissions inventory of macroplastic pollution. Nature 633, 101–108 (2024). [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07758-6](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07758-6)
**Tools used:** the [OWID-Grapher](https://github.com/owid/owid-grapher) plus finishing in Figma
Isn’t most of the plastic pollution from high income countries just dumped on the lower income ones though? I know you said it wasn’t in the post but all that shows is China has stopped importing garbage, not that it isn’t being dumped in other countries. Equally a lot of countries that are having garbage dumped *aren’t* importing it, it’s being dumped illegally by paying off port staff, it’s called [waste trafficking](https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/environment-climate/webstories/waste-trafficking-southeast-asia.html) and has become a massive issue since China stopped taking everyone else’s garbage and started producing lots of its own.
Very interesting article. It is crazy to think that 2/3 of plastic used by low income countries ends up in the environment.
Leed university recieves half a million a year in ‘funding’ from the oil industry.